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Where Do Terrorists Come From?

Unsurprisingly, everyone is scrambling to come up with an ideological backdrop against which Islamic terrorism can be explained. There's an op-ed piece on today's New York Times which makes perfect sense to me. I was going to comment that Professor Roy states the obvious:

[I]f the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.
(nytimes.com/2005/07/22/opinion/22roy.html)

But it turns out that what's obvious to me isn't accepted by everyone. Fred Kaplan has an article on Slate today that says pretty much the opposite of what Professor Roy's column says:

Three new studies, by very different authors taking very different tacks, reach much the same conclusion about modern terrorism: that its practitioners, especially its foot soldiers, are motivated not so much by Islamic fantasies of the caliphate's restoration and the snuffing of freedom, but rather by resistance to foreign occupation of Arab lands.
(slate.com/id/2123010)

Kaplan agrees with these studies in large part because of an examination of terrorist activity in Iraq. An Israeli researcher, Reuven Paz, who has compiled the most complete study of foreign terrorists in Iraq comes up with this conclusion:

The vast majority of Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activities prior to their arrival in Iraq.

Of course, neither Paz nor Kaplan seems to notice that there is a good logistical reason for this fact. Most suicide bombers don't survive to bomb another day. And even terrorists who are not suicide bombers don't wage multi-front wars. They are, after all, just the foot soldiers, not the commanders like bin Laden.

So while I typically agree with Fred Kaplan, I have to disagree here. It is very much who we are that Islamic terrorists want to attack and it has less to do with what we do than they would like us to think. And finally, it is worth pointing out again that Muslim terrorists are not squeamish at all when it comes to killing other Muslims if they disagree with their interpretation of their religion. So perhaps it's not even who we are so much as who we are not (like-minded Muslim fantasists).

Labels: afghanistan, iraq, terrorism, war

posted by Afshin @ 4:01 PM